Political and Ethical Commitments: Interrogating the Politics of Queer Knowledge Production on Sri Lanka’s Queer Communities.

Abstract

This paper examines the political and ethical commitments underpinning queer scholarship on Sri Lanka’s queer subjectivities. Generally, queer scholars share a political and ethical commitment to fostering radical and progressive social changes that challenge unjust social hierarchies and power structures (Jagose 1996, Turner 2000, Knopp 2007 and Knopp and Brown 2003). While there has been considerable writing on Sri Lanka’s queer communities, the political and ethical commitments of queer scholars remain an underexplored area of inquiry. This study poses critical questions such as: How have queer scholars addressed their commitment to ethical and progressive change in their writings on Sri Lanka’s queer communities? What does it mean to produce knowledge that is ethically and politically committed?  To explore these questions, the study reviews literature from the mid-1990s onward. Emphasising the notion of knowledge as fragmented, partial, local, and situated -rather than producing grand narratives-it focuses on ethical considerations related to researchers’ positionalities, methodological complications, connections to the ground, and the framing of queer subjects in scholarly work. The study highlights that much of the existing literature has rarely critiqued the liberal and neo-colonial narratives surrounding queer subjects. Moreover, it demonstrates limited reflexivity in producing such knowledge. These works often exhibit exclusionary tendencies in their selection of subjects and conceptual frameworks jettisoning the heterogenous queer subjectivities and diverse realities of the island.